Christopher Seneno, a Ugandan bishop, said: „It’s good news. We wouldn’t like this bill even to be debated. That will be dangerous because there is a lot of misinformation and excitement. Just with the bill being debated, anything can happen to LGBT people.“

Already, some Ugandan newspapers have taken to publishing lists of alleged gays and lesbians with blaring headlines like “Hang Them!” and “Homo Terror!” The bill is the culmination of an anti-gay campaign that’s been waged in Uganda for more than a decade. […]

But why would people furious about corruption, rising prices, and political authoritarianism care about homosexuality, which is already illegal in Uganda? The answer lies in another country where politics are often hijacked by anti-gay demagoguery—our own. As in other Sub-Saharan African countries, Uganda has long had a taboo against homosexuality. But the political scapegoating of gays and lesbians is a relatively recent phenomenon, one deliberately exported by the American right.

Uganda is a country where American-style evangelical Christianity is exploding, and there are close links between many American anti-gay preachers, politicians, and activists, and their Ugandan counterparts. As Jeff Sharlet has reported, Bahati, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s sponsor, is the secretary of the Ugandan branch of The Family, the secretive American evangelical organization whose members include Sens. James Inhofe, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn. Martin Ssempa, a Pentecostal preacher who has championed the bill, was a protégé of Rick Warren and, during the Bush administration, a recipient of at least $90,000 of American aid earmarked for abstinence promotion. Another major anti-gay activist, Stephen Langa, the head of Uganda’s Family Life Network, is an affiliate of the Phoenix-based group Disciple Nations Alliance.

[…] It is Americans who have elaborated a vision of homosexuality as a satanic global conspiracy bent on destroying society’s foundations, akin to the Jewish octopus in classic anti-Semitic narratives. According to Warren Throckmorton, an evangelical psychology professor once associated with the ex-gay movement, when Uganda’s anti-gay activists speak about homosexuality, they cite materials by Scott Lively and Paul Cameron, two of the fiercest American opponents of the so-called homosexual agenda.

[…] The author of The Pink Swastika, Lively is more than a simple opponent of gay rights. Taken together, his bizarre but influential books The Pink Swastika and The Poisoned Stream constitute a kind of Protocols of the Elders of Zion of homophobia. The former claims that Nazism was primarily a homosexual phenomenon and that the modern gay-rights movement is its direct descendent, a “homo-fascist phoenix” risen from the ashes of World War II. The latter purports to trace the machinations of “a dark and powerful homosexual presence” through “the Spanish Inquisition, the French ‘Reign of Terror,’ the era of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American Slavery.”

Nor was Lively the only American evangelical telling Ugandans that the survival of their society depended on rooting out homosexuality. Kansas City preacher Lou Engle, famous for rallies that draw up to 100,000 people, staged an event in Kampala last year that included Bahati and other architects of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. “[W]e’ve come here to join you, to pray that your government would have wisdom to uphold righteousness in this land,” he exhorted a rapt crowd, some of whom were moved to tears. […]

Engle has tried to claim that he wasn’t specifically endorsing Bahati’s bill. It’s hard not to blame Ugandans for interpreting his words otherwise. “His presence gave the Ugandans a sense of being supported by some American conservatives,” says Kapya Koama, an Anglican priest who researches the religious right’s influence in Africa for the think tank Political Research Associates. “Lou Engle became the sign that what they’re trying to do in Uganda is just fine.”